Bill Gates warns US is in ‘big trouble’ until it starts widespread COVID-19 testing

US billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has warned that America will be in "big trouble" until the embattled country can come up with widespread testing for the coronavirus.

The business magnate and philanthropist poke with CNBC on Thursday, where he said that the US government had shown no interest in creating a “unified system” like South Korea for coronavirus testing.

Coronavirus in the US is “still completely mis-prioritized,” Gates said.

“The natural thing would be to do like South Korea did, and create a unified system -- that we haven't gotten any interest from the federal level,” Gates said.

And “until we have that, we're in big trouble,” he warned, “because as a percentage of 330 million [Americans], we're not going to be able to test many people … [and] we need to know that number because that deeply affects rebounds when opening up. And there is some data that suggests it's not a gigantic number but very, very important to pin that down.”

Gates also told CNBC that "no one should think the government can wave a wand and all of a sudden the economy is anything like it was before this happened.”

"That awaits either a miracle therapeutic that has an over 95 per cent cure rate, or broad usage of the vaccine.”

Gates, 64, said during an interview with PBS earlier this week that the US may not be "completely safe" until the fall of 2021.

Gates, a billionaire philanthropist who is one the richest people in the world, said last week the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charitable foundation he established with his wife, Melinda Gates, will spend billions of dollars to develop a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus.

US deaths due to coronavirus topped 16,400 on Thursday, with more than 459,000 confirmed cases, according to a Reuters tally.

US officials warned Americans to expect alarming numbers of coronavirus deaths this week.

US deaths, the second highest in the world, set new daily records on Tuesday and Wednesday with over 1,900 new deaths reported each day, according to a Reuters tally.

The country had over 1,600 deaths on Thursday, with several states yet to report their latest figures.

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